Lindley's Thoughts

            Lilly was standing at the nurses’ station when they wheeled her ex husband into the emergency room. She did not catch a perfect glimpse of him and would have thought the dark swooping hair and strong nose a coincidence were it not for the EMT briefing her for his chart.        

            Among the din of the hospital, she thought that maybe she had heard the name wrong.

            “Come again?” she asked the EMT who was now growing impatient with her glanced over his shoulder at the disappearing stretcher and her inability to grapple with the patient’s name.

“Brendan Shearer,” he repeated, audibly annoyed. He handed her the papers they had filled out in the ambulance and a familiar wallet. “I assume the driver’s license is in there,” he said.

He left her station and she filled out the forms as fast as her trembling hands would allow. Age-27. Allergies- red dye 40.  Reason for visit- Coronary failure: hereditary. She walked down the hall to the room where they placed him and handed everything over to the doctor.

She knew that tending to him was a conflict of interest, but she wanted to see how the mighty had fallen. One of her fellow nurses in the room gave her a knowing look. She had witnessed the entire nasty ordeal between them.

Lilly leaned over him as the other nurse began prepping him for surgery. He was pale, with tubes in his nose and in his arms. His Caribbean-blue eyes were shut and she could see a pattern of freckles on his eyelids that she had almost forgotten completely about. In the hospital gown, she could see where he lasered of the tattoo he had gotten with her.  She still had hers. She still wore her wedding ring. While taking his pulse, she realized that he did not even have a tan line from where he wore it anymore.

She remembered the day almost a year ago when he left. His eyes were closed then, too. He said that he did not want to see how disappointed she was. But as soon as she started begging him to try again and save their marriage, his demeanor turned cold. He stalked out of the home, leaving her in a place designed for two, alone. Weeks later, on the way to divorce court, she cried before starting her car. Alone in a two car garage. The last time she saw him was in court.  Her life since had been a series of dinners for one.

Doctors were yelling to each other unintelligibly and she pretended to fiddle with machines as they ran minor tests.

“We need to get him to the OR, now,” someone said. There was talk about bypass surgery and stints. As they wheeled his week body away, she followed at a pace for four steps behind. As they passed the nurse’s station, one of her colleagues called out to her and forced her back into reality. She felt as if she snapped out of a daze. She wanted to follow him, and watch how the scene played out. But she felt somehow disconnected, as if it were a movie rather than her own life. Popcorn might be nice, she thought.

For almost an hour she saw other patients and did paperwork until the head nurse told her to take a break. She saw his mother enter down the hall, met with a team of men in white lab coats. Though she could not see her face, it was obvious from her heaving shoulders that she was crying. Behind her was a woman Lilly had never sees before and she assumed was “Nadia”, whom he left her for. She didn’t seem much younger than her or much prettier. But when she turned to a profile view, Lilly could not help but notice the bulge under her shirt. Pregnant. After less than a year, she was pregnant. After five years of marriage he has refused to have children with her. Lilly felt like crying.

 She thought about getting coffee from the staff room, but felt pulled to the OR. She wanted to know what was happening. She grabbed some official looking paperwork, a copy of his chart, and her stethoscope, walking toward the double doors that led toward operation.

Inside, the hall was quiet. The only sounds audible were the whirring of machines. She walked, her footsteps thundering in her ears, toward the heart center.  She checked his chart again, making sure that the room she stopped in front of was the correct room. It was.

She pushed open the door and stood in the preparation room, gazing through the one-way glass. With the same detached sense with which she watched earlier, she watched as nurses sponged blood out of the open wound and the surgeon in green scrubs worked with immense precision.

The chest was open. She could see the heart beating with every beep on the monitor. She recalled nights, laying on his chest, listening to it beat while he slept. It seems so far away now.

As she stood watching the heart expand and contract and lulling her into its rhythm, something happened. She noticed first that the heart stopped moving. Then the heart monitor’s intermittent beep became steady. The movement inside the operation room became hurried.

She half-smiled and turned back to work as they shocked him and it did not work. She had hoped every night for nearly a year that his heart would stop and was granted her most heartfelt prayer.

–Lindley Estes

Lindley Estes

Journal #4: Prompt 1

“A woman sits on the floor of her flat, surrounded by dusty unopened, moving cartons packed seventeen months ago.  Moonbeams, the only light, spill in the window.”

The attic was little more than a crawlspace. Inside were exposed the skeleton of the house, which rattled and shook with the chilly January breeze. It had no real floor, only exposed beams and ceiling material. Anna balanced on these beams, watching the dust she stirred waltz in moonbeams. Her only companion was the soft light that gave her license to move around and not fall. It entered through ventilation shafts under the eaves of the house allowing the wintry outdoors to enter with it. She was not sure if her hand trembled from trepidation or the cold that invaded the attic space.

To her left, moonbeams slanted onto a series of boxes. The first few were taped well, but as they moved outward the taping became more erratic until it ceased altogether. It appeared that something had made a nest in one of the untaped boxes.

She moved the boxes into the attic seventeen months ago and refused to touch them. Only dust left its impression on the lids, besmirched only by the family of raccoons who frequented her upper floor. She heard them at night through the veiling of the bedroom she now slept in alone. They used her castoff belongings as jungle gym equipment.

She was always amazed at how the loneliness never seemed to dissipate.  It grew every morning that she awoke in a bed big enough for two by herself. Her husband up and left when the weather got colder over  a year ago and things began to turn for the worst.

            Anna realized as she straddled two beams that she forgot her box cutter downstairs. But looking at her long, lacquered nail, she realized it would not be a problem. She plunged the nail of her index finger like a jigsaw into the first box. It broke, leaving an open, jagged edged wound. The same thing happened with the nails of her middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, and even the thumb nail. Most were bleeding. All looked like they had been through some sort of abuse.

            The blood welling between the rough edges and her flesh coagulated quickly in the cold air and she was able to rifle through the contents of the box without any real danger of staining them with blood. She pulled out a terry cloth teddy bear and a tiny shirt that read ‘Daddy’s Little Girl”.

            She held them close as she began to cry.

            “I’m so sorry,” she said aloud. “I’m so sorry my body was not enough to keep you safe.”

            The wind howled outside of the old farmhouse at midnight on what would have been her daughter’s first birthday.

The house we lived in had been abandoned for years. The inside was inhabited by raccoons and scores of centipedes. At night the centipedes came out and covered the walls like moving paper and scurried back into spaces between floorboards and holes when the lights were turned on. We were the first family in three hundred years beside the Gee’s to own the old plantation home and it seemed that nature was protecting their legacy.

At the time, the only livable room was the dining room. My mother, father, and I all slept there for the first few weeks, while he renovated their room and the kitchen. The house revealed its quirks to us in time. Since the upstairs was not renovated until I was nine years old, I remained in the dining room. At night the kitchen creaked. One of the first winters we spent there, the pipes which were hand made out of clay burst. The plumber told me that the noise I heard was their constant strain to keep the water in.

When cutting vents into the wall, my father’s saw was stopped by a chunk of metal thrown into the wall. Inside walls we had found broken china and clothes but never something quite as valuable. He had found a naval captain’s medallion from the War of 1812. It resides in a small wooden chest that he made from old timbers removed from the home.

Death was a constant companion in the home. My pets often died strange and horrible deaths and I was acquainted with it from a very early age. Built atop an Indian burial ground, my family commonly finds artifacts when plowing fields or walking in pastures, including a rope bowl made in 600AD. It sits atop out entertainment center as a conversation piece. There is also the Civil War burial ground, where Lee’s troops buried their dead during the retreat. The graves are shallow and unmarked.

I spent most of my time as a child in the Gee family cemetery, which is on the acreage my family acquired. They all lived in my home and I felt like they took the place of my nonexistent playmates. They reminded me of stories of my own family who coexisted with them in Lunenburg County since the mid 1600’s. Our plantation had been sold to carpetbaggers after the war, a fact that they never let me forget. They were angry and disenfranchised. The last Gee’s to live in Ellington were Ruby, Janie, and Lillian. Ruby was the last to die in 1960, but people in town remember them well. They were the three stoic sisters who never married and kept to themselves. Their brother Thomas was only allowed to live in a leftover slave quarters.

At nine years old, the upstairs was renovated and I moved into Lillian’s room. The door had a heavy deadbolt on the outside and iron bars on the windows. It even housed her original bed, which was the bed of her mother, and generations of Gee women before her. She had been manic depressive, and during episodes her family would lock her in the room. Days would pass her by without human interaction. She was Faulknerian.

My neighbor, and her nephew, Malcolm Gee told me in the years before his death about playing in the sitting room below her bedroom and hearing her weeping. Once he recalled hearing scraping noises and screaming. When they went up to check on her, they found that she had been scraping her nails across the floorboards until some had come off and all were bloody. I found the deep scratches near the south facing window.

As my own clinical depression blossomed into a full blown disorder, I felt more and more connected to her. I found it no coincidence that people often mistook my name as Lilly. Hers was the only home I’d ever known.

–Lindley Estes

Their food had gotten cold by now. But it was not the only thing freezing in the room.

The whole damn place is cold, she thought. And rising from the table with a wobble, she crossed the small room to kick the radiator to life. The movement she made was half bounce, half kick and fully pathetic. It gurgled, sputtered out a bit of heat, and was silent again. She sat down on the lifeless machine hoping that it would magically repair itself because tonight, she had tried. But her little black dress was covered by a mammoth of a sweater and their plates by napkins in one last attempt to salvage the meal. She stopped to study what she had left.

The table itself formerly resided in their breakfast nook and was rarely used. Before, she liked having useless furniture to make their life seem quaint. That was a year ago and now glancing at the too small surface, she was struck by how much they had lost. And even though they had nothing, someone needed to clean up.

She did not feel like eating alone in the cold, so she hobbled over to the tiny table and began collecting the silverware. Looking down at a chipped fork, she sighed. The set was a hand-me-down from her sister, who had outgrown it some years ago. It was only three paces for her husband between the table and the sink, but for her the trip took seven. And reaching the counter, she rested upon her elbows for a moment before turning back.

She picked the plates up one at a time. They slid against the wooden top like mortar stones and felt like ice against her palm. Plates, she found after they moved, were harder to carry than anything because they rendered one of her hands immobile and turned her wobble into a full blown hop. The oven was one counter space over from the sink, and marked the end of the cooking space. She opened the door and slid them in as they came. She could not afford to turn on the gas until he came home, but wanted everything to look clean anyway.

At the center of the breakfast-now-dining table was a flower resting in a red solo cup. She had picked it on the way back from the store today. It was just a dandelion, but it smelled and looked nicer than nothing at all. Solitary in the cup, it bent over the side. She assumed the head was too much for the single stem to handle alone.

She sat in her chair and snatched up the folded paper towel napkins, using them to sop up her emerging tears. She had cried more this past year than she has her entire lifetime. Maybe if she had never gone to the hospital everything would have been fine. She should have let the disease in her leg kill her while things were still good.

She jerked around as a key fought in the lock, demanding resistance, and won. In entered her husband, who threw his coat on the floor and stared blankly at her drooping, sweatered form.

“I made dinner,” she said.

“I already ate,” he grumbled more than spoke. From the shoulders of his jacket, it appeared that it was raining. The only window they had was in the next room, and it was too much effort for her to hobble in there and check the weather whenever she pleased. His blank stare turned into mild curiosity as the solo cup registered in his peripheral vision. “What’s that?”

“I picked it this morning,” she said. His gait was smooth and calculated as he approached the table.

“A dandelion?” he asked. “I thought it would make the place seem more like home.” “I don’t need another weed in here,” he said, his voice raising a few decibels as he picked up the cup and slammed it against the floor. “You’re already sucking the life out of me!”

The shape the water made as it ran along the slanted linoleum floor almost perfectly matched the shape the water stain on the bare wall over his left shoulder. She reached down to grab the weed, but his foot found it first. She noticed glitter fall from his eyebrow as he leaned into the light of the dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling. At first she thought it was plaster, but found that her home was more thoroughly falling apart.

–Lindley Estes

     Ted stood on the edge of the pit and stared down at two generation’s worth of refuse. Great gaseous refuse that made his airways burn and contract. He wiped the oil from his hands onto trousers painted green, brown, and black from years of work. Next to him stood safety inspector number 213. The man took three great steps back from the open pit with a handkerchief held to his nose.

     “Oh, no sir. This can’t be overlooked any longer,” he said in muffled voice. Tracy studied him. He was small, timid, wearing an oversized, threadbare brown suit and mustache that appeared to large and too red to be his own adorned his upper lip. The man was half his size with twice his power.

            213 wandered out of sight to poke at the pumps but Ted lingered by the pit. As a child he was terrified of it, a feeling that only increased after his father forced him to enter it. He only went down once. This great gap in the cement could only be reached by hoisting a ladder down into the dark depths and trusting the shadows to not betray your steps. But on that balmy afternoon in 1976 the ladder, rooted in nothing but oil streaked water and gasoline fell sideways and deposited him in ankle deep sludge. It was in his hair, in his nose, in his mouth, under his already dirty fingernails. The light from above was obscured by runoff from the rain that came down all week. It created rainbows, amplified by the gasoline it mixed with. The smell made him want to gag to this day.  He had gotten used to the feeling.

            His father told him to toughen up, even when he was sick from swallowing the mire. And four years after his death, his picture on the opening day poster hung in the office. It whispered in Ted’s ear, imperceptibly, but incessant: wash those windows, fill that up, get a stronger hide, go into the pit and fix the pipes. So he delegated. He hired someone else to go into the pit even though he knew it was a safety hazard and put it out of his mind. There was a new hire to man the pumps and wash car windows, and Ted did what his father refused to do. He did the bookkeeping. It was secretary’s work. Women’s work by his father’s standards.

            Today was inspection day. And Earl, the usual state inspector who allowed nothing but bribes to grease his palms had passed away some months ago. Ted imaged Earl and his father having a barbeque together in the afterlife. In hell, to be exact.

            He never caught 213’s real name, but thought it might come in handy some day as the small man walked back toward him. “The pumps need to be replaced,” the suit said. “But more important than that is the runoff pit. It’s a fire hazard. I’m surprised it’s gone unchecked for so long.”

            Ted did not yet look him in the eye. “So, what now?”

            “You can pay the fine, clean the fuel out of the pit, and replace what’s out of code, or the state can possess it and demolish it if it doesn’t sell.” The handkerchief came out again.

            Ted smiled. He stepped back from the edge and looked 213 in the face. He was tired of inheritance and weary from the constant nausea.

 “Take it,” he said.

 –Lindley Estes

Journal #1

Page 26 ‘Try This” of Burroway

-          Write a paragraph about a thrilling or anguishing incident from your childhood or adolescence. Evoke the emotion you felt in images of all five senses how the scene (perhaps including your own body) looked to you, sounded, felt, smelled, tasted. Allow yourself whatever personification, metaphor, or simile occurs to you, no matter how extreme.

 -Lindley Estes

     At seven years old my legs had outgrown me and looked more like walking sticks than my own limbs. They were excellent for walking through brambles. It was late summer, as my mother, my friend Adam, his mother Merny, and I walked through the forest in search of the vultures we had seen the circling from the porch this morning. My mother feared it would be one of the newborn calves. Out of eighteen born that season, my father only counted sixteen the past few days when he went out in his shirt and tie before work to feed them. But the cows were not the only animals missing. My dog Cassidy had been gone for days. I filled his water bowl every morning but only cats came to lap up the water with dainty scooped tongues.

     The briars tore through the skin on my ankles like a child tearing through tissue paper in search of a birthday present. I left an unintentional breadcrumb trail of blood on their vines as I trudged on, making war scenes out of twigs and undergrowth with my Velcro light-up sneakers. We crossed onto land that was no longer ours and the mid summer heat was making sweat roll down my legs and burn the briar cuts.  We could hear the great bird calls getting louder.

     My mother and Merny talked idly to each other in hushed tones about events happening far away from our spot on the map. Adam, only two years older than me, who never played with toys and watched the news rather than cartoons, chatted with them. I was left the odd child out and grew increasingly bored as we neared the cawing beaks and flapping wings. By now it was nearing two in the afternoon and I could taste salt dripping down my face. I thought it must be like what baby cows taste when we set salt blocks out in the fields for them to lick.

     All of a sudden, the chatter stopped. I was aware of birds directly about our heads. My mother screamed for me to close my eyes. Adam, a pillar of stoicism whimpered. The smell reached me first. I had never smelled death before and it made me gag. As I lowered my eyes from the vultures to the tree in front of me, I cried out. The tree, whose trunk was split in two like Siamese twins held in its middle the carcass of my dog. Its eyes were no longer there. Most of its fur had been pecked off, as the birds were only after its rotting flesh. But most horrifying to me was its gaping mouth. Cassidy looked like he had been caught in mid jump, and in mid bark. His teeth were still glistening and white. Only a week earlier, we had taken him to Charlie Dunavent’s veterinarian office and his teeth had been cleaned.

      The mothers stepped forward and Adam tried to drag me away. They placed their hands under the sparsely covered, emaciated ribs and lifted him like pallbearers lift a casket.

          Tired. Yes that was what she felt. Tired.

          The light around her too, appeared fatigued. In early morning it was lovely and pale, but now, as she exited the sliding glass door, it appeared a burnt yellow. She assumed it had been travelling around the world too long, bouncing from the surface to the atmosphere and back again too many times to account.

            To her left, visible from the weathered porch where she stood, she could see oleander creeping along the briny inlet shore. It competed with no other plant for space or attention. An island of pink among leathery brown grass and marbled soil. The past clippings were obvious in the middle of large tufts of flowers. Here or there, scattered like yesterdays raindrops which still hung on the branches of scrubby trees and made the ground into a great brown sponge. The clippings were now on her kitchen counter among pot and pans and pitchers, where they did not belong.

            But even more comforting than the oleander was the vast empty space. In front of her, just past the flowers, she could see an undisturbed horizon. She had read days previously that the farthest the human eye could perceive is twenty six miles. Where that yellow light met the horizon was twenty six miles away and not a single man or woman disturbed her view. The knowledge made her dizzy with anticipation. Her new found vigor for life was visible from her own deck.

Companionship was for bees and dolphins. Her human body craved the fish within her eyesight to be single and all of the birds in the sky to have only fleeting interests in one another. And she was not disappointed by what she saw.

            She eased her arthritic bones onto a green and white striped beach chair. Next to it was a chair that mimicked it in style and age. She made up her mind to throw it in the inlet tomorrow. But for now, she would soak in her sister sun.

               -Lindley Estes

To Jon Kabat-Zinn, Who Reminds Me to Breathe Deeply and Be Mindful

A voice like crushed blue velvet

ill informed of its listener

reveals to me that hysteria,

heaving my chest as turbulent seas toss debris,

is ill allowing oxygen to my veins.

In times like these

I intend to starve my blood of precious air

so the inheritance my ancestors left

tick, tick, ticking

in my blood might starve

and let go of its creeping vine hold

manipulating my limbs.

I lay on the ground with

feet falling away from each other

encouraged to step out of endless time,

instructed to notice

the small joys in life:

how light makes cut jewels

out of raisins.

I come to this place

where ghost emotions

farm my flesh to no avail,

where mindfulness is next to

Godliness and I pretend to trust

Professor Emeritus and dialogues

with the Dalai Lama

to sidestep pills.

But that velvet voice and those Harvard degrees

feed the never satiated paranoia.

My mind runs circles around

the tired phrases, too worn

to warrant serious thought.

It watches the sunrise and scoffs

At deserving another day. 

 -Lindley Estes

Rural Sensibilities in a Time of Drought

When the dirt split like creases in ancient skin

and the creak dropped under her bed to hide

until the rain came again, he repaired

roof sheets which the heat cracked open wide.

He poured his sweat into the land until

none was left. The crinkle of his brow dry

as the serpentine creak. His blood begged to

nourish the earth, to keep the dead crops spry.

Just as dawn bled over the hill, he pulled

the gun from his belt and showered the land

with blood and brains and skull, to give back to

the earth a dry but modest helping hand.

The body was roofed by ants when found and

a smile plagued the remainder of his face.

And that night it rained as his children

cried for their father’s bitter sacrifice.

 -Lindley Estes

I personally love Pablo Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”. The person reading, John Rossi, was extremely effective. His slow, sorrowful tone of voice was perfect. His tone of voice was especially great on the lines, “ Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’ ”

He trails offwhen talking about “the infinite sky” almost as if there was an elipsis at the end of the line, really giving life to the line. I could picture Neruda staring at the stars on some dark night, heartbroken. However, the picture displayed took away from the reading. I assume it was the reader’s eyes, but the image was disconcerting. I think there may be a pimple on Rossi’s forehead. The music played also detracted from the reading. “The Bells of San Miguel” was too happy a tune to be plaed during the reading. I would have liked to have the voice reading solitary. It would have been much more effective this way. The meter of the song did match the poem, but it did not match the tone. I also was hoping to find a readng of “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” in its original spanish. I had a friend read it to me in spanish once, and the language was much more fluid and muh more sad.